


To Keep and Remember

by grainjew



Category: Pocket Monsters | Pokemon (Anime)
Genre: Gen, Introspective Nonsense, dyou ever think about how ash is basically MADE for phoenix imagery, he's a phoenix boy, like between his name and his association w ho-oh and how much he dies, misty was supposed to get some fire symbolism but then ash ate all of it so shes just the ocean now, this is my love letter to tracey because he is a very soft and nice boy
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-07-23
Updated: 2019-07-23
Packaged: 2020-07-11 17:28:11
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,879
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19931791
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/grainjew/pseuds/grainjew
Summary: Tracey is pretty good at watching.It’s his profession — well, not really anymore, technically he’s employed bytheProfessor Oak, and he’s pretty sure he’ll still be coming to terms with that a decade from now — but even so, he knows how to look, and how to remember, and how to record: he knows how towatch.





	To Keep and Remember

**Author's Note:**

  * For [fallingwish](https://archiveofourown.org/users/fallingwish/gifts).



> -slides in- this has nothing to do with this fic at all but please read tumblr user kuzu kuttithevangu's [Why The Shtetler Angels Left The Old Country And What They Accomplished In America](https://kuttithevangu.tumblr.com/tagged/Why%20The%20Shtetler%20Angels%20Left%20The%20Old%20Country%20And%20What%20They%20Accomplished%20In%20America/chrono) because it's all i've been able to think about for a week

Tracey is pretty good at watching. 

It’s his profession — well, not really anymore, technically he’s employed by  _ the _ Professor Oak, and he’s pretty sure he’ll still be coming to terms with that a decade from now — but even so, he knows how to look, and how to remember, and how to record: he knows how to  _ watch. _

He watches waves crest and recede, on the placid beaches of the island of his birth. The foam makes minute pictures, ephemeral, a ditto of forms; a wingull jets underwater after prey, breaking the image; the sun beats down until cherrim show beaming faces and a lumbering tropius fans open its leaves like veined green sails. 

He meets Marill, on that beach. It is an azurill then, and the way shadows slip over slick blue fur and streak away from the jagged span of its tail send his hands twitching for his sketchbook. Azurill isn’t an easy subject — too much energy — but Tracey finds he likes it that way, and that Azurill likes him well enough to evolve into Marill and find its way into a pokeball almost by accident.

There is a small school on the island, three long thatched-roof rooms set around a dusty courtyard. Instead of going on his pokemon journey, Tracey helps out there, showing kids only a few years younger than him how to hold a pencil, learning how to wipe tears and clean up spills and talk the teachers into telling him everything they know about wild pokemon. One of them is from Unova, originally, and she is Tracey’s favorite, because of her stories about yamask and golurk and volcarona, about the legendary, almost storybook-brave Swords of Justice, about cryogonal-of-the-mountains, cold in a way Tracey finds almost unimaginable. The other two are from the island, same as Tracey, and they don’t have anything near as interesting to say. 

Venonat he meets one sunset in the dusty schoolyard, broom in his hands, and they watch each other for a week until Tracey takes out pencil and paper and makes the first move. He sketches many-faceted eyes, carved like living rubies into shape, dusty purple fuzz like amethyst dust, like a vivillon's scales drifted onto fine grass, fine antennae the color of quartz, and before he’s halfway done he’s already fallen in love. 

Another week and another pokeball later they’re teammates, and that night he sits on the beach, trading dust for sand. Marill is in his lap, jagged tail wrapped around to rest behind his back; Venonat, strangely downy, is leaning up against his side. There are unnumbered stars above him, tracing familiar constellations: Lugia, the Birds, Entei and Raikou, Suicune with its crest pointing the North Star — he tries to find Virizion and Reshiram, like how he was shown, but he thinks maybe the stars are different here, halfway across the world. 

Briefly, a flock of swellow black out the moon.

He thinks: I want to join them.

He thinks: I want to see all the constellations I can’t find, watch a cryogonal turn air into ice, see a magikarp evolve.

He rests his sketchbook on Marill’s head, shapes the moon in 2B pencil, leaves the drawing half-finished as a lumineon crests above the crests of the waves. Flicks a spray of sand into the air with an idle hand.

He thinks: It’s past time I went travelling.

He watches the wake crest and recede, a neat pattern like a pidgeot’s crest shading lines in the ocean’s blue. Lapras’s shell is solid beneath him, roughly patterned in a way that makes it hard to slip off. He wants to make rubbings, but it’s too wet, and there’s too many people, anyways — Misty elbowed him in the face earlier and he keeps leaning back into Ash and Pikachu has already shocked him twice — so he watches the sky instead.

The horizon-line splits the world in two, convex below and concave above, patterned either way by a tracery of white cloudlets, white wavelets. A pelipper dives and gulps and angles itself to distant shore; a triad of milotic lead feebas in a sinuous underwater dance; far below them, a skidding shadow that might be a relicanth or a gorebyss or a tirtouga.

They spend days on tireless Lapras's back, Misty and Ash arguing pointlessly to pass the time. Tracey watches them, or the ocean, or the sky, or Lapras; the two of them are so comfortable with each other, a kind of knowing like siblings have, where they step inside each other's skin like toucannon building a piecemeal nest. Sometimes Misty skins her outer layers and swims alongside when her and Ash disagree particularly, fearless of the depths. She always comes back not an hour later and soaks the rest of them, so Tracey learns to put away his sketchbook at that point and make haste to return Venonat, who doesn’t much like to be wet. 

He feels a little out of place, but it doesn't really bother him, because he's always been better at looking than talking, and because Marill's pokeball and Venonat's pokeball are warm in his pocket, or their bodies are warm in his lap, watching with him.

Scyther is sunlight-warm under his hands too, scuffed with age and wounded pride. It has a dignity to it even prone, burnished scales the color of new grass blending haphazardly with the undergrowth, and a grace to even the frenzied, hostile way it moves. Waiting in the pokemon center’s lobby, Tracey spends three pages of his sketchbook trying to capture the radiant lines of it from memory before his sketches dissolve into rote mindless doodles of Marill, instead. 

He never quite gets it right, but in the weeks that follow, he watches the way light scatters off the facets and planes of it, the way light slides through the wings of it, and Scyther watches, distinguished, over his shoulder as he puts pencil to paper — and he cannot bring himself to be disappointed about that.

Tracey watches Ash boast and bluster and blow hot air, and he watches Ash place a gentle hand on Lapras’s neck and whisper something in its ear. He watches Charizard bend its head, scales singing color in the morning sunlight, watches Ash laugh as fire like carnelian and amber shafts harmlessly around him until they both spread wings and spiral high above the winds.

Misty's got a temper like a riptide, inelegant and dangerous, and it snags and spirals on the rough way she loves. She knows so many things Tracey doesn’t, the sort of experiential instinct Tracey is wondering more and more he’ll ever match with just watching, and when she calls tentacruel and gyarados beautiful— well, he looks, and finds that she’s right. 

He watches clouds crest and recede, make strange patterns across the dome of the sky. The ranch pokemon chatter and caw in the distance, cacophonous enough he can't tell their type, not quite wild and not quite tame, and he catalogues the little details — pidgey in the sky instead of pikipek, the ocean not quite close enough to smell on a wind, kakuna draped like wishes from the branches of trees.

He's started numbering his sketchbooks, because in between duty all he does is draw— watch, and draw, and then find something new for the watching. He thinks Professor Oak approves of the habit, but then, he keeps finding to his surprise that Professor Oak approves of most things he does. It's a strange thing, being approved of, instead of being tolerated. Tracey rather likes it.

Venonat, shy, hides behind Tracey's legs for weeks when they first arrive, and sometimes Tracey wishes he also has a pair of legs to hide behind. Professor Oak is so kind but also softly intimidating, and the oceans of pokemon out back are overwhelming like the open sea is overwhelming, all endless possibility. Venonat picks up on his unease as much as Tracey picks up on its hesitance— but then Ash’s Muk sweeps in and wraps shapeless arms around it like liquid amethyst, draws it in, and Venonat shakes off a cloak of poison and smiles. 

Marill, in contrast, leaps into the company of its own type with an enthusiasm Tracey doesn't think he's seen from it since it was an azurill, a kind of glorious abandon that pulls it away for hours at a time then sends it crashing back into Tracey’s chest, sending stray droplets spiraling into the air and catching light like miniature prisms. And Scyther likes the wide open spaces, but it doesn't like the other scyther much at all. It always looks at them in a sort of fluttering challenge, sunlight slanting through veined wings, and then Tracey has to break up a fight before steady Bulbasaur needs called. So mostly, Scyther rests its chin, scales smooth and cool like precious stones, on Tracey's shoulder, and watches him watch.

When Misty gets back from Johto, she stops by Pallet Town for a few days after putting things in order in Cerulean City, and there’s something heavy around her, like an anchor or a winter coat in summer, pulling her down and fouling her buoyancy. But she just smiles through the drowning and tells him he better email her, now that she’ll have consistent signal. 

He emails her. And when Togetic leaves to fulfill a newfound duty, he remembers Marill’s new egg, the shining way Marill had looked when it came up to him just that morning and beckoned him to see it. He remembers trying to sketch the way Misty had looked at Togepi, like it was capable of miracles, like she’d pull the sky down for it. He wonders for a moment if fate’s web-thin, silk-strong strings are real after all, and then he goes to ask Marill a favor: and the way Misty’s face shines is like Marill’s reflection. 

Tracey knows there is a pidgeot on Route 1.

And he knows Ash raised it, because— more than letters or Delia’s face, he knows when Ash is coming home because he watches the skies over that forest, and every time, the pidgeot circles up and up and up until he can’t see it for the sun, and then it  _ dives  _ and Tracey swears he can hear laughter from miles away. Like that, Ash comes home from Johto, pensive; from Hoenn, oddly grown-up; from Sinnoh, something harsh and vindicated in his eyes; from Unova, something carefree; from Kalos, looking worn; from Alola, a soft peace on his face and a strange ring on his arm. Tracey smiles at him, each time, and draws him with the team that came back with him. 

And he still hasn’t seen a cryogonal, but he’s seen a whole lake of gyarados evolve right before his eyes, and Lugia and the Birds, and Marill and Venonat and Scyther, friends more precious than any rare pokemon. 

He switches pencils to shade the sun glinting opalescent off Meltan’s body, and thinks: I never want to leave.

Tracey is pretty good at watching.

And before you can look, and remember, and record, the most important part of knowing how to watch is knowing how to wait — it’s only a matter of time, really, before the sight you wanted to see passes before your eyes. 

**Author's Note:**

> me: what do i title this  
> my brain: shabbat....


End file.
